by Dan Davis
From the corner of my eye, I saw some of his men cross themselves.
“And after that William trusted you again?”
Dracula affected William’s tone and accent and wagged a finger as he spoke. “You are lucky that you are so useful, my dear Vlad, or else you would have found yourself returning to Wallachia without a head. I have killed better men than you for less. But you will give me a kingdom and so you will live in gratitude for the life I have allowed you.”
“One way to inspire loyalty is to kill all those around you who do not demonstrate obedience,” I said. “Personally, I would prefer to inspire fidelity.”
Vlad snorted. “He had much to say about you.”
“He did?”
“Especially after you killed my father.”
I glanced at the men around us, all listening intently to every word. They looked back at me, their faces impassive and unreadable in the lamplight of the hall.
“He wished to loose you against me,” I said. “Use you as a weapon to destroy me.”
“I think he was delighted to be able to relay it to me. We both share an enemy now, my dear Vlad. My brother Richard stands in our way. We shall kill him together. Draw him close, pretend to be his friend and isolate him. He is nothing without his companions. Richard is witless, quick to anger, impatient as a child, and filled with mad passions. Never fight him. Be his friend and then betray him.”
My heart racing, I looked again at the men around the hall. They were all armed in one way or another.
“Good advice,” I said, shrugging.
“It was,” Vlad said. “The only allies you have in my fortress are two mortal servants to attend to you. And even they are not here.”
“But I have you,” I said. “My friend and ally, Vlad Dracula.”
“Yes,” he said, smiling at last. “You do. William is truly my enemy and you have proved yourself to be a friend. More importantly, you are a good Christian who has fought for years to keep the Turk at bay and so you are a friend to all Wallachians.”
I let out a sigh and drank off my wine. “So you played along, no matter the cost, for years. And when the Turks released you, they believed you to be theirs. Do they believe it still?”
“I think that they do, yes.”
“But you mean to fight. And you mean to defeat William?”
“I do.”
“How?”
“He is more powerful than ever. His Blood Janissaries might be impossible to stop. But if I can draw William in, draw him close and away from his men, I mean to surround him and kill him.”
“And how will you do that?”
“Sometimes I imagine filling him with arrows, other times having a hundred hand-gunners shoot him at once, or to blast him in half with a cannon. Whatever is left, I shall cut into pieces and burn.”
“A very pleasant fantasy, I am sure. But how will you isolate him from his… Blood Janissaries, as you called them?”
Vlad glanced at his men. “I wondered if you might consider using yourself as a lure? If he knows where you are, I believe his hatred for you is so strong that he would come for you in person.”
“And how do you propose to do that?”
“Send men with messages through Turkish territory and have them captured and—”
“That trick may work on a boyar but William would not fall for it.”
“Well, then, there are many ways in which—”
“I have a far better idea,” I said. “William has his immortal Janissaries. The red robed Blood Janissaries. As you say, they will prove almost impossible for mortal men to overcome and I am certain William will never leave their protection. That is why he created them, I assume.”
“He made a personal army that is loyal to him. My intention is to avoid them and to kill William directly. To cut off the head of the snake. After that, they will be unable to replace their numbers and so I can grind them away into dust.”
“We cannot isolate William from those men. We will have to go through them to get to him.”
“But if, as you said yourself, they cannot be overcome then—”
“Not by mortal men. What about by immortal ones?”
“Your men? How many is your company? Twenty-five soldiers? You are outnumbered, sir.”
“My immortal men, yes. And me and you, also.” I glanced around the hall. “And your men.”
“What do you mean, my men? I have no immortal men.”
“Ah, yes. But I could make you some, Vlad. If you wished. I could make you five hundred of them. I could make us an immortal army of our own.”
11. The Saxons
1461
“Repeat after me. I swear to serve Richard Ashbury from this day until the day of my death. I swear to obey him in all things and to obey the orders of his captains without question. With the strength of my arm, I will fight the enemies of Wallachia without flinching or fleeing and with the strength of my heart I will protect the people of Wallachia with unwavering fidelity. Together with my brothers, we serve the Voivode of Wallachia Vlad III Dracula against his enemies, wherever they are found. I swear also to take no wife, to have no sons and no daughters, and to have no father but my lord and to have no brother but my brothers of the sluji. All this I swear in the name of Christ.”
I released the young man’s hands and took one step to the side while Vlad Dracula took my place, holding the dragon amulet in one hand and his father’s dragon sword in the other. The young man leaned forward to kiss the amulet and the hilt of the sword. Walt and Rob helped him to his feet and led him to the Blood Altar, a stone table at the top of the hall. Wearing no more than his undershirt, he shook in the cold air. No doubt, he was also terrified. Many of them were when it came time to be initiated into the blood brotherhood of the sluji. Over three hundred of the men who would soon be his brothers stood in the hall, silently watching.
Dracula had chosen to name our new immortal army the sluji which was a word that meant “to serve” and was meant to emphasise that our blood brothers were sacrificing their mortal lives for their prince and their people. The true nature of the sluji was hidden from outsiders, even most of the men close to Vlad. To everyone else, we were a special bodyguard, loyal to Vlad with foreign mercenary officers, namely me, my close companions, and the immortals of the Company of Saint George.
The young initiate lay on the altar. Walt sliced an incision on both of the initiate’s wrists and his blood flowed into bowls. The bowls were taken when almost filled and passed amongst the watching blood brothers, who each took a drink and passed it on to the man beside him. There were many bowls of blood in a man’s body.
Those chosen for the sluji knew that they were giving up their families and their chance of ever fathering a child again. Most of the volunteers we chose were peasants but all had proven themselves in one way or another to be competent or courageous in battle, or at least in training.
It had taken a lot of arguing to reach agreement about the immortal army. Vlad had argued that they should be loyal to him. I had refused to make any man an immortal who was not personally loyal to me, which Vlad could not agree to. Eventually, we came to a compromise of sorts. The sluji swore loyalty to me but they would only fight the enemies of Wallachia. I could never order them to England and expect them to follow me. And I could never order them to fight against Vlad or his allies. All the initiates understood that.
The newest man was so drained of blood that his eyes were clouding and his eyelids fluttering. Taking a knife, I cut my own wrist and held it to his mouth. He knew to drink quickly and so he did, grasping my arm in both hands and sucking the blood from my wound. When he had a bellyful, he fell back, unconscious.
My companions had argued that I could make no concessions as far as loyalty was concerned. They feared that Vlad would work to subvert my authority and take command using his rights and power as their royal lord. And the immortal knights and men-at-arms in the Company of Saint George had argued against adding so many men
of one nation to our number, lest they turn against us. They were also contemptuous of the new men’s abilities. I assured my men that this was a new venture, separate from the company that they had earlier joined. They were placated by being granted positions of authority in the sluji, with responsibility for first training and then leading the men in battle. Along with an accompanying increase in pay. They found the terms acceptable.
The young man was carried away to the quarters behind the hall, where he would either die in his sleep or rise an immortal brother of the sluji. I drank a bowl of his blood to replenish that which I had lost and came forward to meet the next initiate, who came forward and knelt.
“Repeat after me.”
While we made more immortals and trained them to fight as an army, Vlad was also busy.
He drew as much personal power to himself as was possible. He became a most generous patron of the Orthodox Church, granting tax immunities and other privileges to monasteries and built new church buildings and extended old ones. In return, he expected and received both submission to his will and passionate support from the pulpit. Vlad needed the peasantry to believe in him, in his vision for Wallachia and he knew it was going to be a hard fight. Peasants must be told something in the simplest terms and for them to retain it they must be told repeatedly and so the priests of the Church explained to their flock that the changes Vlad was making was in their interests and to trust in their prince as they trusted in the Lord.
In fact, the sermons that were preached were perfectly truthful. As the boyar class was weakened, the peasants and the Church gained power.
Vlad especially favoured a monastery at Comana which he founded himself and filled with loyal monks. The Catholic Church had long been exerting its own influence in Wallachia, especially since the recent crusades, and Vlad had many of these Catholics thrown out of his lands before replacing them with Orthodox appointees. I heard that several obstinate Catholic priests and abbots were impaled.
“It is evil,” Stephen said to me, when this news reached us in the north. “He does great evil.”
“He is making these lands his own, Stephen. All will be loyal to the Voivode of Wallachia. No divisions anywhere that can be exploited. This is just as you wanted.”
“Under the Hungarians,” he replied, as if I were a simpleton. “Under Catholic Hungarians, not barbarian eastern heresy.”
“What else could we do?” I asked. “Beggars cannot choose their benefactors, Stephen.”
“Please, Richard, do not let axioma dictate our actions.”
“Come, come, Stephen. You know as well as I do that no man ought to look a gift horse in the mouth.”
He tutted and huffed but we were certainly not about to challenge Vlad on his opposition to Catholic priests when it was Christendom itself at stake should we fail in our military duty.
“There will be no schism to heal,” I said, at least a dozen times, “if we all live under the Turkish yoke.”
All the while, Hungary continued its internal strife. Back in 1456, the young King Ladislaus V of Hungary had come to post-siege Belgrade which was under the command of Ladislaus Hunyadi, Janos’ eldest son. The Habsburg-allied lords who controlled the King of Hungary were the enemies of the Hunyadi and no doubt meant to remove the commander of Belgrade from his position. And so Ladislaus Hunyadi seized the king and killed his ally Count Celje in the ensuing row. Capturing his own king was a bold move by young Hunyadi and he only released him after receiving assurances that the king would take no action in retaliation.
The king lied.
He arrested and then executed the eldest son of Janos Hunyadi and took prisoner the younger son, Mattias Corvinus. Michael Szilágyi, the elder Hunyadi’s brother in law and the boys’ uncle, rebelled against the King.
Szilágyi was an able commander and many were ready to follow him. God alone knows what a civil war would have done to Hungary but then King Ladislaus V died. He left no heir and the crown was once again up for grabs.
Wasting no time, Michael Szilágyi brought fifteen thousand soldiers to Buda and with such a force present, convinced a council of nobles to elect Mattias Corvinus Hunyadi, son of Janos Hunyadi, as King of Hungary.
Having a Hunyadi on the throne of Hungary was a good thing for us. Now, we did not know Mattias, but both Vlad and I had been supporters of his father and so we hoped and expected that we would be favoured in Wallachia’s looming conflict with the Sultan.
But we did not realise just how difficult it was for Mattias to do anything but fight tooth and nail for his crown and for the true authority to wield his power. The first years of his reign were spent attempting to throw off the control of his uncle Michael Szilágyi.
And later, Mattias seemed almost uninterested in the wars on his south-eastern borders, preferring to focus on the struggles for dominance in central Europe. In fact, he did nothing to prevent the extinction of Serbia as a separate entity from Turkish Rumelia and clearly viewed Belgrade and the Danube-Sava junction as the natural defence line he would hold against the Turks.
In Wallachia, we were beyond that line.
Young Mattias Corvinus Hunyadi looked to the German elements within his lands for support and this included the enormously wealthy Saxon merchant colony towns of Transylvania and along the Wallachian border. Whereas his guardian Szilágyi looked for support from vassal lords.
Dracula was long a friend to Szilágyi. In fact, he admired the man greatly. When Dracula had been under Hunyadi, Szilágyi had shown him great friendship, helping him with words in ears and even with gifts of gold and men and such favour was not soon forgotten.
So when Szilágyi asked Dracula to help him with a rebellious Saxon town, Vlad readily agreed. He assembled a small but powerful force and we rode into north-eastern Transylvania to the town of Bistri.
“Bring the sluji,” Vlad commanded me. “We will see what they can do.”
“They are not at full strength,” I replied, “and we have so much training to do before they will be battle ready.”
“Bah!” Vlad said. “There will be no battle. We will raid. We will threaten. They will capitulate. This will be no more than another form of training.”
Still, there was much to prepare, even for a short campaign close to home. We had to procure the horses, the servants, wagons, tents, and other equipment needed to maintain a force of almost five hundred fighting men. And immortal ones at that. The experience of my mercenary captains was invaluable, however, and we were ready to march in time and joined Dracula’s other forces as we made for Transylvania.
“We have long tolerated the Saxons in our lands,” Vlad said as we rode through the mountains. “This rebellious town of Bistri is one such colony. Their forefathers were invited to settle in our mountains and ever since we have allowed them to prosper. It cannot be denied that they generate a significant amount of revenue through their trading and the making and selling of goods. Some of these towns were swift to support me against Vladislaus, although it is clear that they make decisions based on mercantile reasons rather than for honour and duty. For they honour only themselves and are not tied to our land the way our own people are. There is one town, you know Brasov, yes? Of course you do. The townsmen of Brasov were especially generous in their support of me and so I had to respond in kind. When I wrote to them that they were honest men, brothers, friends, and sincere neighbours, they knew my true meaning.”
“It was more than empty flattery?”
“How can mercantile men ever be honest? How can they ever be brothers to those so different to them as we Wallachians are from Saxons? How can they be sincere neighbours when both they and us know they do not truly belong in our lands?”
“How did they take your jibe?”
“They will have taken it for what it was. A warning.”
Not only was Vlad keen to put the Saxons in their place for Szilágyi, and to see the sluji in action, it was an opportunity to exercise his own men and to test the skills they had been trai
ning. His army was small and new and he had to find out what already functioned well and what did not.
Bistri was well-fortified and that was no doubt one reason they felt they could defy Szilágyi and refuse to send him the requested revenue.
“The sluji can assault it immediately,” I said to Vlad. “We can cross the outer works at a run, throw up ladders, storm the walls and open the gates for the rest of the men.”
Vlad smiled. “That would be a sight to see, Richard. But our Saxon friends and our own men would certainly see the somewhat more than human nature of your soldiers. And we should do our best to avoid that, for as long as we can. Besides, there is no need. My boys can do the job almost as well. Bistri is nothing.”
He was not wrong. The Wallachian cannons blasted holes in the town gate and the hand-gunners and crossbowmen kept the town militia ducking down behind the battlements while infantry rushed forward to assault the walls and the gatehouse. It took no more than that. Our soldiers soon penetrated the defences and looted and burned the town.
All the while, I stood and watched from a safe distance. Before the sack was completed, the ringleaders of the rebellion fled to the larger Saxon towns of Brasov and Sibiu and Vlad was content to let them go.
“We do not need to exterminate them,” he said. “Our point is made.”
“What is your point?” I asked Vlad.
He laughed. “It is that the Germans are guests in Transylvania and Wallachia, no matter how many generations they have been here. Do not rebel against our good will or you see what will occur.”
In Buda, Michael Szilágyi was delighted with Vlad’s swift work of retribution and rewarded him with a castle dominating the Borgo Pass. Having made his point, Vlad led us all back home and we called it an informative exercise. Adjustments were made to the organisation of the soldiers and the supply train and I continued to recruit and train the sluji.